Leading open-source-as-a-service company also introduces Fission, a new serverless framework based on Kubernetes

SUNNYVALE, Calif., Jan. 24, 2017 /PRNewswire/ — Platform9, the open-source-as-a-service company making cloud infrastructure easy, today announced the general availability of its Managed Kubernetes service, the industry’s first infrastructure-agnostic, SaaS-managed offering. Unlike legacy software distribution models, Managed Kubernetes is deployed and managed entirely as a SaaS solution, across on-premises and public cloud infrastructure. The company also introduced Fission, a new, open source, serverless framework built on Kubernetes. These offerings feature a drastically simplified operational and consumption model that eliminates the steep learning curve currently associated with Kubernetes, and allow DevOps and IT teams to focus on solving core business problems.

“SaaS-managed delivery makes Kubernetes accessible to a much larger audience at a time when many development teams are committing to microservices as their cloud-native development paradigm,” said Sirish Raghuram, chief executive officer at Platform9. “We have built our reputation on our OpenStack-as-a-service offering, which remains a core focus — and propelled 400 percent customer growth for Platform9 in 2016 alone. While enterprises will be running virtualized workloads on OpenStack for years to come, though, there’s growing demand for platforms that offer a choice of virtualization, microservices or both. Microservices in particular require a more intuitive, managed approach that reduces time-to-value for Kubernetes projects and work on any choice of infrastructure: on-premises, in the cloud or across multiple clouds.”

Kubernetes has emerged as the standard for container orchestration and microservices, but projects are often hampered by the prohibitively steep learning curve required to effectively use Kubernetes, and the technical complexity needed to fully integrate and manage production Kubernetes environments. Platform9’s Managed Kubernetes service is fully integrated, truly infrastructure-agnostic and introduces a much faster, more manageable way to leverage Kubernetes. It saves considerable time and capital for DevOps and IT teams, allowing them to integrate across any combination of cloud platform or on-premises infrastructure without re-engineering a single line of code — or worrying about backend configuration and maintenance.

“Platform9 Managed Kubernetes is a positive addition to the ecosystem in helping make Kubernetes run anywhere,” said David Aronchick, Kubernetes Product Manager at Google. “This illustrates the innovation and momentum from the thousands of contributors to the project that are moving Kubernetes forward as the standard for cloud-native and containerized applications.”

“A significant challenge with running containerized applications in production is managing the container orchestration software stack. For instance, engineers need to watch upgrade of the Docker runtime or the cluster orchestration agent to ensure that there is no downtime for production applications during upgrade,” said Kuldeep Chowhan, cloud architect at Expedia. “Managed Kubernetes provides significant value to companies that are serious about use of containers because it eliminates the complexity of managing the container orchestration layer, while running on any infrastructure.”

Managed Kubernetes Features

Platform9 Managed Kubernetes features a number of important capabilities, making it truly enterprise-grade:

Pure-Play Kubernetes, SaaS-Managed: Managed Kubernetes packages upstream releases as a “SaaS managed” solution, meaning it will always be 100% pure-play, avoiding vendor lock-in. Because the solution is deployed, monitored, supported and upgraded as SaaS, users can focus on using Kubernetes without the management overhead.

Fully Integrated, Runs Anywhere: Several Kubernetes integrations are included out-of-the-box: end-to-end security, multi-tenant controls for user quotas w/ SSO integration, integration with external persistent storage and load-balancers, making it easy to use in any infrastructure from on-premises to public cloud providers (such as AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Compute Engine).

Highly Available: Managed Kubernetes creates highly available, multi-master, multi-etcd Kubernetes clusters that can span across availability zones in your private or public cloud environment. This means your Kubernetes environment can tolerate local failures across one or more availability zones.

Runs Side-by-Side with OpenStack: Managed Kubernetes is offered as a peer service to Platform9 Managed OpenStack, giving customers the freedom of choice across both. Microservices developers can use Kubernetes independent of OpenStack, virtualized application developers can use OpenStack, and IT/Operations can manage across both frameworks through a single management pane.

For a more detailed technical overview of Platform9 Managed Kubernetes, click here.

Fission: De Facto Open Source Alternative to AWS Lambda

Fission represents the fastest, simplest way to start developing applications for Kubernetes. It provides a simple, serverless interface to leverage Kubernetes, enabling DevOps and IT teams to write REST-based application backends, event-driven automation or custom application controllers. Instead of taking weeks to realize the value from Kubernetes’ powerful abstractions, developers can now deploy simple REST functions to Kubernetes within hours.

Fission, which is fully open source, is similar to AWS Lambda in providing an intuitive serverless developer experience. However, Fission differs from AWS Lambda in several important ways:

Runs anywhere: Fission decouples serverless from the underlying infrastructure. It can be run anywhere Kubernetes can run, which ranges from developer’s laptops, to datacenters in enterprises and service providers, and public clouds such as Google Container Engine or Amazon Web Services.

Open and extensible: Fission is an open-source project (under inception with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation), thereby enabling a wide ecosystem of contributors and users to collaborate under the umbrella of open-source. The framework is extensible to various languages and runtimes.

Makes Kubernetes more user-friendly: Fission provides a more intuitive first experience for anyone new to Kubernetes or microservices, and will accelerate time-to-utility for Kubernetes. In addition, Fission makes it easy to integrate other Kubernetes services, enabling greater automation and flexibility for applications being built using the leading micro-services framework.

Platform9 provides open source-as-a-service for enterprises that need faster and easier ways to manage cloud infrastructure across multiple platforms. Unlike do-it-yourself or legacy solutions, Platform9 delivers best-of-breed cloud infrastructure like OpenStack and Kubernetes as SaaS-managed solutions to reduce cost and time to value, all while avoiding being locked into a single vendor ecosystem. Platform9 helps DevOps and IT teams focus on solving core business problems while automating much of the set-up and management process on the back end. It has enabled customers like Box, Blue Cross Blue Shield and PlayStation to realize a greater than 99 percent success rate with OpenStack projects. Founded in 2013 by a team of early VMware engineers, Platform9 is backed by Menlo Ventures and Redpoint Ventures, and headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif. For more information, visit www.platform9.com.